


Pick Your Dreams

by Seek_The_Mist



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, M/M, Ronan as Morpheus, pynchweek16
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 14:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7761277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seek_The_Mist/pseuds/Seek_The_Mist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam finds himself in the arms of Morpheus. Being favoured by a God is a life-changing experience.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>  <i>The man was as young as him.</i></p>
<p>  <i>He looked at him. Blue eyes among aristocratic features chiselled in marble stared back, one elegant eyebrow lifting up, puzzled.</i></p>
<p>  <i>The man was thousands years older.</i></p>
<p>  <i> “What a peculiar creature, I thought you craved sleep”<i></i></i><br/><i></i><br/><i></i><br/><b> Pynchweek - Day 1 - Mythology AU <b></b></b><br/><br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick Your Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Also known as: I throw myself in the bandwagon of "Ronan as Morpheus" just because the God of Class-skipping and Car-racing was sadly not a thing in Ancient Greek.
> 
> This is the first fic I've written in several years, look what this freaking ship is doing to me!
> 
> I feel also obliged to point down that the fic is un-betaed and English is my second language.

  
  
  


The first time it happened, summer was a humid and unrelenting mantle on the Island of Crete.  
  
Adam laid awake, suffocated by the heat that only worsened the throbbing ache of his body, the pain in his right calf and shoulder strong enough to be reduced to white noise while every bone and tissue around them burned.  
  
His small wicker in the corner of the day room was too textured, too stingy, his old rag of a blanket too thin and coarse in itself to really counterbalance it.  
  
In the only other room of the house, his mother quiet sobs and even quieter cries had long since died off, his father done with her just like one hour before he had been done with Adam.  
  
Yet, everything seemed to require more attention than Adam’s stupefied state was able to give.  
  
Not enough to really care or do something about it, too much to just sleep and be done with one day more.  
  
No amount of silent internal reasoning on the dawn getting closer every minute he wasted awake was enough to persuade him, not even when on the other side of it was endless and excruciating hour in the fields.  
  
He could not care. He could not feel.  
  
He was too tired to care or feel anything but an encompassing hurt.  
  
Still, there was a part of him too angry not to munch over the fact that there was possibly only one person sleeping soundly among these bare walls.  
There was nothing to disturb the sleep of his father, free of his rage after shattering his family with the weight of it, one time more.  
  
He would not care. He would not feel.  
  
He wanted sleep.  
  
He wanted out.  
  
At some point, though it sounded impossible and weird and way to sudden but it was not like time was not as liquid as the heat in nights like these, he must have fallen asleep.  
  
The sound of feathers fluttering was soft and close to his ears, the hardness of his bedding forgotten in favour of something more organic, cool and smooth skin just as impossible as the cloak of heat finally relenting from his senses.  
  
He looked up, through the confused heaviness of his eyelid.  
  
He remembered his mother, much younger, her smile proper and steady, cradling him in her arms in a windy day at the doors of autumn while they looked at the ships approaching the harbour down the hill.  
  
It was vivid enough that for a moment he felt like that shoulder was her shoulder, like he was little more than a toddler again and he could sleep in his own memory.  
  
But Adam was not a creature of peace, nor he was prone to let his mind linger into the bliss of forgetfulness, every memory tainted and every feeling nailed hard into reality.  
  
The vision faltered in favour of a young man, broad muscular shoulders naked but for brushes of skin-deep black paint, strong legs and arms at the two sides of Adam’s body.  
  
Laying sideways with his cheek on the curve of his vision’s shoulder, he was more comfortable that he had the right to be.  
  
Feathers fluttered around them again, Adam’s eyes followed the sound of them to find broad wings, blue-black like a raven’s, encircling the both of them.  
His mind impossibly provided that it was the man’s wings.  
  
The man was as young as him.  
  
He looked at him. Blue eyes among aristocratic features chiselled in marble stared back, one elegant eyebrow lifting up, puzzled.  
  
The man was thousands years older.  
  
“What a peculiar creature, I thought you craved sleep”  
  
The man’s voice was low, too velvety for the dangerous look of him.  
It fitted him perfectly.  
  
“I do”, Adam hazily admitted.  
  
“And yet you reject a perfectly reasonable scenario. How do you want to sleep?”, the man pushed.  
  
He might have sound annoyed to anyone else, but Adam was too good at spotting sings of irritations in others. His life depended on it.  
So he knew that the man was not really cross with the situation.  
  
Adam regarded him again, his right cheek still heavy on his shoulder.  
  
He was solid, and mysterious and more restful than anything he ever experienced in his life.  
  
“Like this?”, he suggested, with the unpolished logic only dreams can possess.  
  
The man’s laughter rumbled low in his chest, vibrating along his shoulder, his amusement passing to Adam through his skin.  
  
“What a peculiar creature” he repeated, even softer now, his eyes following Adam’s face with a pondering expression.  
  
One of his hands caressed their way up Adam’s naked back, following the knobs of his spine.  
  
He ought to be drenched in sweat.  
He ought to be uneasy and tight-wounded enough to be almost skittish.  
He ought to be constantly aware of how much everything hurt.  
  
He was not any of these things, not in this strange sort-of-dream, and so he did not jump away nor he properly replied.  
  
He just sighed, slowly and deeply.  
  
The man’s hand reached his nape and started to stoke his way downwards again, surer but still delicate.  
  
Adam’s eyes followed the contemplative smile opening his way through the man’s face, a weird satisfaction lingering into it like a child’s pleasure in a well-executed mischief.  
  
The man’s free hand somehow produced a small box, open and full of glassy spheres.  
  
Some glistened, some shined, some were filled of smoke and some were dark and dangerous as the drawing on the man’s arms.  
  
“Pick your dream and sleep with me”  
  
The hand on the small of Adam’s back was sure and steady, the world around them shielded by raven’s wings and non-existing.  
  
He leaned more heavily on the accommodating shoulder, his consciousness fading around them as soon as he brushed against one of the glistening spheres.  
  
Adam slept.  
  


* * *

  
  
Morning found him awake and alone, and yet strangely aware.  
  
The memory of the curve of a neck and the press of an hand accompanied him for the whole day.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Everything remotely nice in Adam’s life tended to disappear quickly and hurt him in the process.  
  
The man of his dreams stayed, unfazed, untouchable.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Adam was the poor son of poor farmers, poor enough to work in someone else’s land instead of owning anything more than the clothes on his back.  
  
This did not make him dumb, let alone ignorant.  
  
There was not enough strength in the world to let his father’s punches push him away from his chats with merchants, philosophers, scholars and travellers in the harbour.  
  
So he knew, of course, that the proper way to address his dream man would have been Morpheus, and that addressing his appearances with one of the priest of the temple in town would significantly increase his wealth and status.  
  
Instead, he kept his nights for himself and just asked, a rainy evening at the end of the summer:  
  
“How do I call you?”  
  
The hand caressing the hair on his nape slowly stopped, the curve of the jaw resting on top of his head moved while the man turned to look at him.  
  
“Ronan”  
  
The answer was slow to come and wary in a vague way that spotted a lie that was not exactly a lie.  
  
Adam could counter with a new name for himself, something less worn and battered as his own felt all the time, something that was never called in ways that he would rather forget.  
  
He did not.  
  
“Ronan” he echoed, accommodating, “I’m Adam”.  
  
The irony of introducing themselves after sleeping together for months did not escape them, Adam’s tilted grin mirrored by Ronan’s.  
  
Ronan leaned close again, his nose brushing against the outline of Adam’s ear.  
  
The drawing of his breath rumbled throughout him like a thunder after a lightning.  
  
“Pick your dream and sleep with me, Adam”  
  
Refusing Morpheus would have been blasphemy.  
  
Refusing Ronan was impossible just the same.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
The winds picked up and the temperature dropped, steadily, while winter approached.  
  
Adam’s lips marked the changing, drying and chapping. They were uncomfortable and he felt reminded of how remarkably unattractive they must be while Ronan traced them with a smooth finger and a curious expression of wonder.  
  
Adam stayed still under his investigation, mildly aware of his own frown. How weird he must look, bronzed by the sun, hardened by the fieldwork, tattered by the winds and bony from barely enough food.  
  
Ronan, in contrast, had all the elegant perfection, the smooth lines, the full body and the soft skin of the Olympus he belonged to.  
He became aware of the fact that Ronan was looking at him, now, instead of just his lips, one second too late to school the evidences of his thoughts away from his expression.  
  
He diverted his eyes, looking for a proper way to speak up and bury the issue without having to address it.  
  
Ronan lifted his chin and kissed him, until his mouth was wet and his breath shattered.  
  
His chest was heavy with wonder and want.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
His lips stopped chapping under the weight of demanding kisses.  
  
Spring was ages away, but poppy flowers blossomed, insistent and bright, on the other side of the wall against which Adam bedding lied.  
  
He felt favoured by the Heavens and weirdly, amazingly, wanted back.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Winters were terrible, always.  
  
This one was warmer, even without enough shelter or food or clothing, with the presence of Ronan by his side.  
  
The weight of the abuse was worse with the cold, everything felt stiffer and the bruises were too hot against his skin.  
  
Ronan caressed him until he was warm, kissed him until he was pliant.  
  
He felt safe and yet brutally miserable.  
  
“I want out” he murmured, biting Ronan’s shoulder in desperate frustration “I want this to end”.  
  
“I can make this end” Ronan replied, soft and matter-of-factly.  
  
Adam knew he could in the same unflinching way he did not think of his mother confessing of his father’s recent nightmares in a hurried rush as a coincidence.  
  
Few things would sound more tempting.  
  
“ _I_ want to make this end” was what he replied, stubbornly and already bracing himself for an argument.  
  
Ronan’s glare was as dark as his raven’s feathers, for a second, but his grip was not unkind while he held Adam closer, the line of their bodies a perfect match against one another’s.  
  
“What you need” Ronan replied in a slow and considerate murmur “is an occasion”.  
  
It was too much truth to argue against.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Nine days passed without any divergence from the withering routine.  
  
The dawn of the tenth day was bright and clear, enough to see an unknown ship approaching even from the hills.  
  
The commotion at the harbour, while Adam passed by, was all around the young nobleman from Athens and his quest to win the favour of the Gods.  
Something on Crete was to be conquered at all costs, here and nowhere else.  
  
The nobleman, even from afar, was sticking in his fine peplum, a trick of the light made his pin resemble a poppy for a brief, glittering second.  
  
Ravens cawed, flying over the roofs.  
  
Adam felt like laughing and dizzily took some rushed steps forward.  
  
He knew how to pick his dreams, after all.  
  
  


* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Shouting at me on my [Tumblr](http://seekthemist.tumblr.com) is always an option!


End file.
